


Long Shadow Across Your Heart

by charmandstrange



Category: Daredevil (TV)
Genre: Angst, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Friendship, Gen, Post-Season/Series 01, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-05-07
Updated: 2015-06-10
Packaged: 2018-03-29 10:45:21
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 5,078
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3893458
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/charmandstrange/pseuds/charmandstrange
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Matt Murdock is very good at what he does. That doesn't mean it doesn't hurt him in the end. </p><p>When a lifetime of anxiety and trauma resurface after bringing down Fisk, Matt doesn't handle it very well, but Foggy and Karen understand (in their own ways) and are there to help as best they can.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Written for [this](http://daredevilkink.dreamwidth.org/725.html?thread=307413#cmt307413) prompt.

Matt’s sitting against the wall on the third floor landing of the stairs to his apartment, his head in his hands.

_It shouldn’t be this way. I shouldn’t be this way. I’m a lawyer- no, I’m a soldier, I should be better than this, I shouldn’t-_

Fuck.

He’s been stuck in this thought cycle for a while, ever since his chest or his throat or his something had tightened and choked him while he was digging in his pocket for his keys about fifteen minutes ago. He’d been finally, _finally_ coming home after an unbelievably long day (and night) in the office, searching for any way at all to get their (his and Foggy’s and Karen’s because they were all together, and he couldn’t let them down _again_ now that things were finally maybe okay, right?) client out of completely fictitious assault charges. He’d stayed late at his desk, reading and re-reading every account of the incident outside the bodega on 54th long after Foggy and Karen had left for the night, but once his fingers had begun to ache, he’d admitted defeat and began the walk home.

Until he wound up here, gasping for breath and fighting the paralyzing fear that seemed to pin him against the dingy, cracked wall of the stairwell.

_I shouldn’t feel this way. I’m a soldier. My mind controls my body. I shouldn’t feel this way._

He coughs, swallows against the bitter taste in the back of his throat, and shakily stands up, keys in hand.

*

Matt had been scared for Karen and Foggy since the beginning of the whole Union Allied debacle. Karen knew that. She understood that all of his arguing and controlling and admonishing came from a place of concern and ultimately of love. 

Matt had absolutely been scared, but the discomfort-verging-on-panic she saw lurking in the tight way he held his mouth recently, well, that was something completely different. 

Whatever it was had started about four days after Daredevil caught up with Fisk and made the front page of every newspaper in the city. 

Or at least that’s the best timestamp Karen has for when she first began to worry. 

She’d come into his office early one morning to find him already bent over his laptop, earphones in, deep in concentration. _(On what? They didn’t really have a case right now, and was he wearing the same tie as yesterday?)_ She’d dropped a file folder on his desk, and he’d jerked back, startled.

“I didn’t-“ he shook his head, rubbed the back of his neck, and looked up at her with a good imitation of a natural smile. “I didn’t hear you.”

_Why should you have?_

“Oh, well, it’s just word got around about our work for- for Ms. Cardenas, and a group of tenants in a building on 8th forwarded us some information about a problem with their landlord, and I know it’s not exactly our practice, but do you think you-“

“Yeah. Yeah, I’ll look into it, thanks.” 

Karen hesitated, looking at the crease in Matt’s brow as he reached for the folder and ran his hands over the first document. “Do you n- if you want some coffee, Foggy just put on a pot when he came in.”

“I’ll get myself a cup after I read this.” He paused, looking up at her, smiling a little more genuinely. “Thanks, Karen.”

*

The day passed slowly and quietly. 

With Fisk out of the picture, greedy landlords seemed a lot less frightening than they had before, but greedy landlords had always been a problem in the city, especially in light of the rapid re-gentrification of the west side after the Incident. 

Foggy was tired and frustrated, and somehow just thinking about tenants being pushed out of their homes reopened the fresh wound of Elena’s death.

And he hadn’t seen Matt all day. Which was just unacceptable. They were best friends, partners. They shared everything, but most importantly, they shared a very tiny three-room office that left absolutely no excuse for missing each other at work. 

But Matt had kept his door firmly shut all day, and Foggy honestly wasn’t even sure that he’d left his office to get coffee from the weak pot of burnt tasting Chock Full o’ Nuts he’d made that morning. Which, like, Matt _never slept._ He drank more coffee than any of them, for all he complained about the taste. 

Lunchtime had come and gone. Karen ate a foil-wrapped sandwich at her desk before slipping quietly out of the office like she had for the past few days. 

Foggy had walked to Matt’s door and lifted his hand to knock before lowering it and going to the pantry to find some snacks he could put together to constitute a meal. He tried not to worry that Matt had gone out last night and injured himself again or reopened his stitches and somehow found a way to quietly bleed out in his office. 

Finally, a little after four, Foggy snapped his laptop shut and walked past Karen to Matt’s door and knocked.

When no one answered, Foggy cracked the door open to peak inside. Matt’s head rested on his arms, skewing his glasses slightly off his face. 

Foggy didn’t especially want to wake him from whatever sleep he might be able to get, but the frightened voice in the back of his mind whispered _Matt doesn’t do this normally, what if there’s something wrong, what if he is sick, what if he is for real actually bleeding out, what if what if,_ so he walked over the Matt’s desk, trying to make his footfalls as loud as possible.

He tapped Matt lightly on the shoulder but jumped back quickly as his friend snapped his arm up to grab his hand.

Heart pounding, he folded his arms and backed towards the wall. He tried to keep his voice even. “Hey, sorry about that buddy. Haven’t you been getting any sleep lately?” 

“No, that was… That was me. Sorry. It’s just been a weird few days with- you know.” 

“Yeah, Matt, that it has. How bout we grab Karen and head home for the night? Order some takeout and have an early dinner. You can crash at mine if you want.”

Matt stretched back, yawning, “no, you go ahead. I don’t even know how long I’ve been asleep, and I really should at least get through this file today.”

Foggy didn’t exactly agree with the logic of that argument, but he nodded and then said “yeah, next time then” (just in case Matt couldn’t tell) before turning to leave. He may be a lawyer for lost causes, but even he know an argument he had no chance of winning. 

He paused at the doorway and looked back to where Matt was already opening the folder and running his hands over the paper.

“Just don’t forget to get some dinner, okay? And maybe leave off the night job tonight?”

He closed the door behind him without waiting for a response, hoping he could at least convince Karen to join him for a drink.


	2. Chapter 2

He’s been tired for what feels like forever. Clients are finally beginning to trickle in through Nelson & Murdock’s doors, but he can’t stop going out just because Fisk’s organization has collapsed while he’s awaiting trail. Every guy Fisk paid off or scared off is out there trying to be the next big thing in Hell’s Kitchen. 

But no matter how late he stays at the office, no matter how many blocks he runs or punches he takes, he can’t seem to fall asleep at night. 

He (usually) does eventually, of course, but more often than not he wakes sweating and out of breath from dreams he wishes he couldn’t remember.

He climbs in through his window after a relatively quiet night tracking down connections of connections of known employees of Fisk. He slowly takes off his costume, focuses on finding a clean pair of sweats. He’s too tired to shower, but he’s too caught up in the adrenaline of the night to sleep just yet.

Too frightened of what could happen when he closed his eyes.

He should meditate. 

He can sit as still as he wants, but can’t tune anything out, from the particles of dust on the floor to the intercom buzzing two blocks away. 

Suddenly his heart rate is increasing instead of slowing down, and everything is too loud and too much but somehow also muffled and confused at the same time. The world around him seems like it’s exploding, but he can’t make any sense of it at all.

Eventually, he crawls into bed, wraps himself in his heaviest blanket, and puts in a pair of ear plugs, the ones he never uses because that’s weak, that’s giving in, that’s letting his guard down. He tells himself that it doesn’t matter, that he’s got a sleep deficit bigger than the hole in the MTA’s budget, that if he doesn’t at least try to let himself sleep tonight, he’ll be no use to anyone anyway.

He’s still awake when his alarm goes off a few hours later.

 

*

Karen tried her best to let go of the Matt thing. Days passed, new clients called. They’d made little progress getting those two families' landlord to leave them and their rent-stabilized apartment alone, but at least no one had been stabbed so far. 

They were going to survive, to be okay, somehow. Together, the three of them, they were safe. Sometimes, when she crawled into bed at night, she would repeat Nelson and Murdock, Attorneys at Law to herself over and over, her lips forming the words, until she fell asleep. 

She knew a little about insomnia, about nightmares, about the kind of fear and guilt that coated your insides and smothered everything else about you. It had been weeks since the suit and the basement and the gun, and her breathing had only just lost its shaky, uneven quality. 

She knew that something was very, very wrong with Matt. 

She tried to mention it to Foggy one night at Josie’s (Matt had once again declined in favor of “an early night”), but Foggy had only looked at her, eyebrows drawn together, and poured them each another round of mystery liquor.

After they had downed as much of their glasses as they could, Foggy sighed. 

“I’m only going to say this once, but have you at all considered talking to someone, y’know, else about all this? Not the stuff about Fisk or the investigation or whatever, just the don’t want to be in your apartment part.” He stared intently at the marks his fingers left on his glass. “I know you’re worried, I mean I’m a little worried for all of us, but you gotta like look after you first, right?”

Yeah, of course.

*

Foggy and Matt had Civil Procedure together every Thursday morning during their first semester. Most mornings, they managed to drag themselves to the lecture hall with one giant thermos of coffee to be passed between the two of them, and Foggy would do his best to take notes while Matt sat quietly and listened. 

Except for one day in late October. 

Foggy already knew that Matt was not nearly as together as he seemed to want everyone to believe. Foggy knew that sometimes Matt would lie awake late into the night, or worse fall asleep only to have the sort of dreams that made him twitch and whimper, and Foggy swears he heard Matt crying to himself one night, not that he’d ever ever mention it to Matt. (There were a lot of things Foggy was ready and willing to bring up in order to tease Matt in front of girls- and boys and pretty much anyone-, but the thought of Matt scared or in pain terrified Foggy too much to even really let himself think about it.)

But he wasn’t prepared for this. He had just taken a sip of coffee when he heard a gasp from his right where Matt was sitting. He looked over to see his roommate breathing raggedly and desperately trying to undo the top button of his shirt with a shaky right hand, while his left hand hovered over what could only be his pulse.

Foggy had known what a panic attack looked like. He’d known that Matt probably wasn’t actually dying, but the look of terror on his friend’s face had awoken a protective instinct he wouldn’t be able to temper over the years to come.

Later, after he’d dragged Matt from the lecture hall- fuck Professor Fisher, fuck classes, fuck law school, his friend was in trouble-, bought him a bottled water from the 3rd floor vending machine, and managed to guide him to sit on the steps outside the building, he asked if whatever that was had happened before.

“It’s not- that was nothing. Not a thing. I’m fine.”

Foggy gently picked up Matt’s hand and looked him in the face. “I’m giving you a very disbelieving stare right now. Not the eye-rolling kind; the concerned kind.”

Matt sighed, but he didn’t pull his hand away from Foggy’s. 

“I guess yeah, it has. It’s just, you know, made sense it the past. There’s always been some kind of reason. This…” He trailed off, absently rubbing the fabric of his pants with his free hand.

“It’s not like it’s something you can control, man.”

“I know.” 

“Have you ever seen a doctor about…this? I’m sure there’s like, medicine for this kind of thing out there.” As soon as he said it, Foggy realized how contrary that very idea was to everything he knew about Matt Murdock, law student, Hero of Hell’s Kitchen, and professional at Taking Care of Himself. (Matt had an idea of what “taking care of himself” meant that was probably exactly contrary to the standard definition accepted by other, more healthy people.)

“Or we could use this blessed time that we’d normally be in class to go sit in the park and enjoy the last sun we’ll probably see for the next three years.”

So once Matt stopped shaking, they walked down the steps into Morningside, and Foggy didn’t mention the “not a thing” again until the next time it happened.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Really short update this time y'all, but hopefully the next update will come much more quickly.

There were a lot of reasonable, excusable reasons to want to fix whatever was wrong with Matt. Nelson & Murdock was finally busy for the first time in its young life, and having one of the partners stop functioning at top form at this critical moment was certainly a serious risk to the health of the business. Besides, if the ‘car accident’ kerfuffle taught her anything, Foggy and Matt obviously needed each other in order to be vaguely useful, focused co-workers. 

But Karen knew that wasn’t all.

Even before waking up covered in blood, she couldn’t remember ever feeling safe, let alone cared for. By pure chance and the influence of illicit cigars, she had found a tiny, fragile corner of safety and comfort in a world that seemed to be collapsing (figuratively and literally). Foggy and Matt and their idealistic little law firm were all she had to cling on to.

No one wants to cling to a sinking ship.

(Especially not when one is already drowning.)

Regardless, Karen really did care about Matt and Foggy, and it hurt more than she knew it could to see one of them obviously struggling. Obviously sinking. 

Even if Matt was doing okay internally (and there was almost no way that was even slightly possible), he was going to run himself into the ground with the way he was treating himself lately. If Foggy wasn’t going to intervene for her, she knew she could get Matt to listen to her somehow.

A team dinner seemed like the best possible option. (It felt both comforting and incredibly dangerous to think of Foggy, Matt, and herself as a team, but she knew deep down it was true.) 

Foggy would almost certainly support her if it came down to that, and if she could combine making Matt a captive audience with forcing a real meal and a little relaxation on him, then all the better. Besides, she’d been dying to try out the new tapas place on tenth, and a good excuse would help her feel slightly less guilty for encouraging the obvious effort at making the Kitchen more gentrification-friendly. 

She just had to find the right moment to suggest it.

*

It was, of course, a fight that finally brought things to a head.

Not the horrible, scary, emotional kind of fight with Foggy (or Karen), but the normal, run of the mill kind of fight, the chipping away at crime and abuse and maybe making up for one’s own faults through a lot of pain kind of fight.

Matt was really, unbelievably exhausted. He’d maybe been this kind of tired once or twice before, during his first finals of 1L and in the weeks after his dad had died. When he’d forgotten how to eat or sleep or even (embarrassingly) control his own senses.

It wasn’t like that this time. It really wasn’t. He knew he was an adult and could keep himself together and not let himself be overwhelmed like a weak little kid. If he couldn’t get everything right he could at least keep on going, keep on defending good people by day, keep on hurting bad people at night. (There was a small, irrelevant part of himself that wasn’t quite sure whether he counted among the ‘bad people’, but it really didn’t matter as long as he didn’t stop.)

But that didn’t change the fact that he was so tired that the world seemed both slowed down and sped up at the same time. Reality seemed to come in waves, his separate senses staggering to process the same information at the same time to form any kind of picture of what was going on around him. It was an inconvenience in the office but a deadly hazard when faced with three muggers at the same time. 

It turned out that Matt could land a solid punch even when his sense of his surroundings and attackers was a little out of focus, it just took him a little longer. 

But more time meant more opportunities to get beaten up, and by the time he stumbled out of the alley and back to his apartment, there were probably lots and lots of unpleasant things wrong with his body. He knew he’d been punched a lot, and the pain in his chest was probably the only thing keeping awake as he made his (slower than usual) way across the rooftops of Hell’s Kitchen.

There might have been a knife. Matt couldn’t quite tell, and honestly he didn’t really want to know. Pain was pain, and it all was his own damn fault; it didn’t matter if he was punched or kicked or stabbed, as long as he eventually took everyone else down. Still, there may have been a knife. 

Matt half-fell through his window, knowing full well there was no chance he’d make it to his bedroom that night.

He hadn’t considered the possibility that he wasn’t alone until Foggy’s familiar, shaky voice reached him through his haze.

“Jeez you look…”

But Matt didn’t get to find out how he looked because he chose (or his stupid, useless body chose) that moment to give up and collapse beneath him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Feel free to bother me over at cassmasterns.tumblr.com - lbr, I want to hear all of your angsty headcanons.


	4. Chapter 4

There were times Foggy wished he’d had a super-skilled mentor teach him how to meditate and stop caring so much.

To be fair, he’d only heard a little bit about this Stick character from Matt’s childhood, but the dude sounded like the absolute worst. Foggy was kind of mad at him for driving Matt towards the totally not cool vigilante stuff, but he was mostly mad at him for what sounded like behavior that definitely crossed the line into abuse. (Hurting Matt was like… the least okay thing in Foggy’s book. He tried his hardest to not think about _anything_ that’d happened in the last few months.) 

And as much as Foggy wanted to believe sometimes (in his most angry, betrayed, or, ultimately, scared moments) that Matt didn’t care at all, he knew that wasn’t true. He was honestly mostly scared because Matt cared so damn fucking much. Cared enough to get himself hurt again and again. Sometimes it was easier to pretend and be angry.

But still, some high-powered meditation skills would come in handy every once in a while. Like when your best friend falls unconscious in front of you for the second time in way too short of a time span.

But Matt had been okay when he’d run after Fisk, and he’d been (mostly) okay every night since then. And Foggy knew that he’d agreed to this at some point. He’d decided long, long ago (sometime between _wounded handsome duck_ and learning to quietly coach Matt through panic attacks) that he was going to be there for Matt, no matter what. 

He just wasn’t expecting this much _blood_ to be involved.

*

Somehow, it turned out Matt was actually kind of fairly, reasonably okay.

Well, Matt was not actually okay, not in any meaningful sense of the word, but Foggy really didn’t have to be worried about his imminent death or anything.

 _This time_ , the cruel (reasonable) part of himself reminded him.

But really, sometime after the sheer panic and the frantic (to be forgotten, possibly with large volumes of alcohol) cries of _Matt, MATT, Matty!_ , and the slow removal of a stupid, ridiculous costume from his best friend’s semi-conscious body, Foggy realized his… his Matt was going to be just fine. Was not actually hurt _that_ badly. Wasn’t going to bleed out on his weirdly industrial floor or suffer any brain damage or broken bones or any of the other things that maybe kept Foggy up at night. 

(Foggy hated everything about this. He especially hated that he could accept his best friend’s obvious pain, obvious internal turmoil, obvious suffering and even be relieved because at least he wasn’t dying just yet. He didn’t like what it said about himself, and he really, really didn’t like what it said about Matt.)

There were an awful lot of bruises, and Matt’s nose was bleeding, but Foggy had no idea if it was was broken (and how many times had he been punched in the face before? How did he manage to look so damn crisp and clean and _beautiful_ despite it all?) The most worrying injury was a shallow gash above his left hipbone. It wasn’t deep at all, but Foggy was pretty sure the new costume was supposed to be good for _something_. He didn’t like to think about the kind of attack that would leave any cut at all in his friend’s skin. 

But there was no reason for Matt to have collapsed. Except if it was about something other than the fight.

And suddenly Foggy couldn’t stop thinking about his talk with Karen. Because he’d known it was true; he’d known something wasn’t right with Matt. But he’d known that for years. He’d _seen_ it for years. He knew there was stuff (stuff that had become infinitely more clear after finding out about the Devil of Hell’s Kitchen) that had hurt Matt in ways he couldn’t understand.

He’d been there for panic attacks and inexplicable arguments and skipped meals and Matt curled up in bed with his hands over his ears. He’d thought he kind of got it.

But maybe things were worse now. Maybe Karen saw all of… _this_ in a different, clearer light than he had.

Matt was awake though, and Foggy knew he probably should be talking to him, comforting him.

“Hey, hey buddy, you’re okay. You’re in your apartment. Do you need anything?”

Matt shook his head, eyes wide and mouth tight. 

“I know you probably don’t want to hear any of this from me right now, but I just need to know some stuff to make sure you’re safe. Because I’m here for you, and I definitely brought my baseball bat with me just in case. So we’re both fine, but I just need to check in, okay?”

Matt didn’t say anything, but when Foggy paused from cleaning the cut in Matt’s side to press his hands down on Matt’s shoulders, Matt seemed to relax a little. 

“It’s just, in the last few weeks… I haven’t seen you hurt like this?” Foggy wanted to mention how even the slightest bruises he could see behind Matt’s glasses would bother him (had bothered him, for years, even before), but he knew this wasn’t the time.

“And you even have a sort of reasonably useful suit now, though I still don’t agree with the color scheme, and the horns really are ridiculous.” He tried to keep it light, even though he was feeling anything but funny at the moment. If and when Matt was lost in a panic attack, sometimes he needed Foggy to be carefree and silly and just how he’d be it one in the morning in their dorm. Though it didn’t always help. 

“Okay, so Fisk is in jail? So, no one is actually out specifically to kill you right now- that we know of- so how does... this even happen?” Foggy paused to pour antiseptic onto a washcloth. “ _Is_ someone out to kill you?”

Matt looked like he was trying to respond, his mouth moving as if to form words, but no sound was coming out. Foggy really, really hoped (for the first time ever) that this was just some kind of psychological/physiological panic thing and not the consequence of a horrible, invisible injury. 

(Because, given Matt’s track record, both were about equally possible.)

Matt shook his head again and took a few breaths that looked painful even from Foggy’s point of view. 

“Okay. Okay, that’s good.” It wasn’t good. Nothing was good. Nothing about this was even possibly describable as “okay.”

Matt wasn’t even the slightest bit dying right now, but every blaring alarm in Foggy’s mind wouldn’t stop going off. The problem with caring about Matt Murdock was feeling, a lot of the time, that every part of the world (often including Matt himself) was out to take his best friend away from him. 

Foggy sighed and put his hands back on Matt’s shoulders.

“You don’t have to like, face me or anything, but I’m gonna need you to breathe with me for a minute, okay?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Feel free to bother me/ tell me your headcanons on tumblr at cassmasterns


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Filler/mini update this time just because I've been so slow lately. 
> 
> Um just a general warning, all of Matt's not super healthy thoughts are definitely not the opinions of the author. JSYK.

Most of the time, things were just kind of a blur. Work was a point of clarity. Matt knew, if he pushed himself, if maybe he slept a little less and read a little more, he could be a brilliant lawyer. But even now, even in his lazy, underachieving approach, the law meant something. There were rules he could internalize, precedent he could analyze, words he could say that would get people to listen to him. The quest to find those perfect words took him outside of himself for a moment.

(Nothing was quite as good as fighting though. In the mask, Matt could cheat. He could be someone else. Someone with a purpose. With rules about how the world worked and how he operated within it. Matt knew who the so called ‘Devil of Hell’s Kitchen’ _was_.)

When he really needed to ground himself, Matt could recite under his breath all kinds of facts about himself or Supreme Court opinions or all the current DA office staff members names or even (when he was really desperate) plot lines from the network television shows he heard playing all over his apartment building. Sometimes, when he was especially tired and worn down, he would laugh to himself about how ridiculously tv drama his whole life was. That made it a little more okay.

But sometimes it was like getting hit by a truck full of radioactive chemicals. (If nothing else, Matt could be thankful for having the most beautiful, ridiculous analogy ready-made and verified by his own stupid life.) Sometimes he couldn’t pick out the bad times in his life from what he deserved. Sometimes he felt overwhelmingly guilty for letting any of it happen in the first place, maybe even by the sheer fact of his existence. Sometimes he couldn’t pick out who Matt Murdock even fucking was from a sea of ‘should have done better’ and ‘shouldn’t have let that happened’ and ‘how do I make this stop?’ 

Getting lost in that kind of doubt and emotional weakness was a sure way to lose a fight. Matt knew that. He knew he shouldn’t even entertain _any_ of the weak, confused thoughts he had, but they kept happening to him. Somehow, he couldn’t separate himself from the rest of it.

He had done an okay job with the whole Fisk situation. Not great. He could’ve done better, could’ve kept Karen and Foggy and Claire and (have mercy) Elena and Ben out of it more. He could’ve fought harder and more persistently, but still, he (thanks to everyone else, honestly) got it done in the end. But as soon as Fisk was securely on his way to await trial, Matt lost his grip on the last crumbling piece of earth he was holding onto. 

(That’s not fair. He was fine for a while. _Better than fine._ He was happy to have his friends still in one piece and happy to see his neighborhood have the chance to rebuild after the trauma of the last few years. It’s just the happiness got dangerous too quickly.)

He knew the last few weeks had been hell, but Matt had convinced himself that any kind of misery was deserved and okay and for the best. If he slept less, that just meant more time to get work (both the legal kind and the other kind) done. If he missed a few meals well, obviously he was still functioning fine, so he should be glad for saving money and time. If he pushed Karen and Foggy away, then good, they should be as far away from his as possible. (This last was the hardest. No matter how many excellent arguments Matt made to himself for pushing his friends away, some treacherous part of himself fought back just as strongly.)

The last few weeks had been hell.

But the last thing he wanted was to scare Foggy like this again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Feel free to bother me/ tell me your headcanons on tumblr at cassmasterns


End file.
